This is one for the Aussies (and maybe the Kiwis). Last September when I took my Mum and brother around Europe for month, we saw something being filmed in Mykonos, and at the time we were told only that it was some Australian film or something or other. Well I've just now found out that it was this - The Kings of Mykonos which is the sequel to The Wog Boy released in 2000 hahaha! There is a trailer for it here in which the scene we saw being filmed above features at exactly one minute into the video. Randomness :)

So here's a random story (because they're always the best). The council authority under which I live (Westminster Council, which covers all of central London) is big on recycling, and so they should be. Every Tuesday morning we put our recycling bin on the roadside, and the men with the jobs we all made fun of at primary school come around, sort through its contents, and leave the empty bin back on the roadside for us to collect. We've had a constant problem since day one with people nicking off with other people's recycling bins, because someone else has nicked theirs, and so on and so on it goes. For example, I come home from work and find our bin missing, so I go flog the neighbour's bin, and they in turn go flog someone else's, and so on until eventually the one I flogged gets flogged again hehe. We got a bit sick of this recently and so ordered in a new one from the local council, and wrote our address on the side of it to discourage folk from nicking off with it. The plan was working for about two months (the longest we've gone without our bin going missing) until last week when low and behold we get home from work on Tuesday and the fucking thing's missing, so I had to go flog the neighbour's again. Anyway I get up this morning, and what's sitting across the road but none other than our bloody bin, full of some other audacious prick's recycling! So I marched over there, emptied the contents of their recycling out of our bin on their front door step, returned the bin I'd flogged to the neighbour, and brought our bin inside. Geez the nerve of some people! And that's my story.

One of the best things about living in London is... getting the fuck out of it! Here we have a random country road (with the country equivalent of a traffic jam going on down there)...

A random church with a cacophony of bells that wouldn't shut up...

A random phone box in the bushes...

Random country towns and, of course in this country, no shortage of random country pubs. Seeing at it's summer and days are so long just now, Katie and I have decided to try and get out of London once a week after work by picking a random direction and finding a random country pub to get a feed (hooray for her work car!). After interrogating some country folk we were led to this joint - The Castle Inn in the tiny village of Chiddingstone, home to practically nobody and supposedly the most perfect surviving example of a Tudor village in the county.

Out the back is a pathway that eventually leads to Chiddingston Castle, some tourist attraction no one's heard of with collections of ancient artefacts which are on display in the castle rooms. I was more interested in the scenery around it though, and what was left of some poor bird that looks to have been attacked by something hehe. While stuffing our face at the pub we were clearly something of a novelty (Kiwi city folk) and were offered to spend the night at the local bed and breakfast, run by a woman drinking at the pub who was clearly desperate for business. Ahhh, gotta love these country folk!

Incidentally, today was the longest day in the northern hemisphere. Every year for summer solstice all the hippies gather at Stonehenge and throw some overnight festival to see the sunrise, and half of them end up getting arrested for various drug-related offences.

Defenestration: the act of throwing someone or something out of a window hahaha!

So here we have an old busted laptop, and an old busted printer, and here's what happens when you hurl 'em out of a window ;)

Hehehe.

Next up, out went the lappy ;)

Not quite as exciting that one - it just bounced around a bit.

Video footage of the printer going out here, and the laptop here - both shot by my flatmate Jess.

...the British weather turns it on. For the last few weeks now it's been nothing but sunny and pushing 30 degrees (well, aside from that cloud in the distance there that started rolling in this afternoon) - shaping up to be the first decent summer I think I've seen since coming here almost four years ago! Anyway I've been out and about as always this weekend but nothing especially note-worthy, although I did want to point out this pub. It's a boat docked on the Thames just south of Lambeth Bridge which is just down from Big Ben and the London Eye etc. Very cool little spot to knock back a cider and chips in the sun hehe :)

I bet that car's proud ;)

On the 5th of May 2007, I bought the first beast in Edinburgh - a £1,000 GT Zaskar.

A year later in May 2008 I'd clocked up 2000kms, and four months thereafter in September it was up to 3000kms by which time I had relocated to London. At this point I was pissing and moaning about the fact I'd done some 5000kms in Brisbane over the same period of time, and that was testament to Britain's atrocious weather.

5000kms came during a four-day 300km cycling trip around the Netherlands with Davydd over Easter 2009, and 6000kms a few months later around my birthday when I spent the weekend cycling around Paris.

A month later the bike was stolen in central London by some fuck and his bolt cutters, and replaced a couple weeks later with beast number two: another GT Zaskar but the 2009 model which set me back about £1,400 (minus the £1,000 paid out by insurance company). At this point the odometer was sitting on 6,800kms.

In the year since, 8000km rolled around during a ride from Glasgow to Loch Lomond, and 9000km during Easter this year while mountain biking in Snowdonia in north Wales.

Most of those kilometres were on-road, mingling with pedestrians and traffic, but the bikes sure have gotten a beating off road too.

There have been copious rides where I've come home covered in shit, and it's ended up all over the bath tub after washing the bike down hahaha!

I sometimes ride where I apparently shouldn't (because I can't read), I've pulled a skid on the Prime Minister's driveway at his country residence in Chequers, I've run from the police, and I've hit numerous pedestrians and educated numerous drivers (by way of yelling at them - mostly chicks) on not cutting cyclists off, using their mirrors, and bloody indicating where they're going.

And if I had a dollar for every one of these, I'd be rich.

Anyway, after three years, two months, and three days since buying the first beast in Edinburgh, the odometer finally hit the big 10,000 tonight. While the various thousand-kilometre milestones have been reached in a variety of exciting places, this milestone was reached in a far less exotic location - just down the road from my flat on the way home from work hehe.

Given the length of time I plan to remain in the UK, I only expect I'll do a few more thousand at most before finally moving on (the astute among you will see that's about a year's worth ;) but regardless there'll no doubt be plenty more of this.

Hahaha!

Silverstone Circuit, home of the British Grand Prix, and some 100kms northwest of London. A group of us from work were given VIP access to the circuit, courtesy of our CEO because we're all so awesome ;) Today was day two of the qualifying rounds for tomorrow's main event.

We rocked up in a 2007 Ford Focus to find ourselves surrounded by Porches, BMWs, Ferraris and so forth.

Further to that a lot of these kept coming and going throughout the day for the even richer pricks who couldn't be arsed driving in.

We had a short walk to our hospitality for the day, outside of which was an Aston, a Lambourghini, a Ferrari...

...and a golf buggy hehe.

This was our view of the action - perfect!

So this was all pretty bloody nice! We were fed like kings, got smashed on champagne...

And even the dunnies were flash hahaha!

Now we've all seen Formula 1 cars on TV, but that really doesn't do them justice - these things are incredible. Immense speed and handling aside, the noise of them is absolutely deafening! The 2.4-litre V8 beasts running at 18,000rpm had us all wearing the ear plugs! Here's a video I shot from the stands.

I was hoping to see a bit of carnage, like whatever caused these skid marks all over the wall, but alas no luck ;)

As the day went on and the Champagne and the Pimms were flowing, the old rich pricks with their young bimbo bitches were falling over and just generally being twats.

All aboard the Hoe Fucker.

British because it's best - ha! So yes that was my day playing VIP at the British F1 qualifiers :)